RomMig

This Summer, Megan Thomas from the University of Liverpool undertook a Masters Research Internship supervised by RomMig Co-I Tamara West and by Katy Hooper from the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives. In this invited blog, Megan reflects upon her complex work during the internship, the potential of visual mapping, and on the need for compassionate archival practice.

In April, I began work on the Gypsy Lore Society (GLS) Archive in the University of Liverpool’s Special Collections & Archives (SCA) as part of the Masters Research Internship Scheme (MRIS). My small role within the larger interdisciplinary collaboration was designed to build upon understandings of the collection through an exercise in ‘identifying’ missing or separated material. Here, photographs, correspondence, postcards, and newspaper cuttings previously separated from this central record series (to be rearranged in the ‘photograph’ series, for instance) were flagged within the GLS SCA finding aid. This affects the reinscription of meaning and relationships between archival material, subjects, and creators. The meticulous process of combing through Society correspondence from 1926-1966 illuminated the multiple and capacious networks represented across the GLS collections.

Setting the tone for the duration of the internship, my first day in the archive saw the surprising identification of a photograph, acting as somewhat of a ‘missing piece’, in the visual record of the 1906 Romani migration to the UK from Germany. Here, recently relocated photographic evidence of historical presence offers the exciting potential to ground community narratives in a visible, tangible past. The applicability of this for the RomMig project is immediately striking.

Throughout this internship I was fortunate enough to gain some insight into the amalgamation of archival research, cultural geography, and community outreach in the form of the geospatial storytelling software, Humap. The software seems uniquely appropriate to represent what Humap itself calls ‘imperfect spatial data’. Tracking the physical movements of any group or individual through the archive will be, as a consequence of preservation or interpretation of ‘value’, by nature ‘imperfect’; however, material representations Roma and Sinti migration to the UK in the early 1900s are increasingly dislocated by racist generalisations in the British press and the assumption/appropriation of the cultural authority by academics (‘gypsyologists’). This, in turn, has resulted in multiple and disparate assemblages of archival material across the country relating to Roma and Sinti migration (often remaining out of community control).

Promisingly, Humap makes possible the visual collation of what is known rather than be ensnared by absences. The opportunity to build upon pinned geographical locations and previously ‘unfindable’ photographs with rich, textured narratives is made possible by community collaboration in a software that interactively layers geographical space-time with archival material.

Relating to my MA study of Archives and Records Management, the MRIS project engages multiple strands of critical archival theory with its principle objective; ensuring the usability and accessibility of the collection. Compassionate archival practice creates space to negotiate how previously harmful collecting practices can be mitigated in the present to avoid recreating or perpetuating traumatic interactions between the GLS archive and the community it purports to represent. This became a key element of my process when surveying GLS correspondence.

The finding aid used by SCA is helpfully flexible in allowing additional layers of contextualisation and description. When working with particular periods of GLS correspondence, eg. late 1930-40s, it seemed necessary, both in consideration of potential users and recognition of the subjects of the correspondence, to flag the material with Nazi iconography or policy. Similarly, my close reading of the collection series highlighted additional material that requires more compassionate archival care. Flagging photographs of children, as well as, racist language, and sexist/violent descriptions of women demonstrates a recognition and move away from the colonial, ethnographic interpretation of Roma and Sinti lives that were foundational to the practice of GLS “research” and publishing. An awareness of the presence of this material, made visible by sensitivity flags, promotes dialogue between the archive and its users; particularly, in regard to collaborative records-management approaches (eg. repatriation and record closure). Acknowledging potentially traumatic material emphasises the necessity of archival approaches that redress the unequal power-dynamics and colonial mindsets which facilitated the breadth, extent, and intimacy of collated GLS material.

On 14 September, Eve Rosenhaft and Volha Bartash, who joins RomMig as our new research team member (Welcome Volha!), travelled to Osnabrück for the Sinti Music Festival organised by our cooperation partner Mario Franz of the Niedersächsischer Landesverband deutscher Sinti. Here is their summary of the event, along with some photos.

The festival takes place in Osnabrück annually and enjoys increasing popularity with the local public. Among visitors were friends of the Landesverband, admirers of jazz music and community members including families and young people.

According to Mario Franz, the Musik Festival seeks to demonstrate a rich cultural tradition of German Sinti. For many, playing music continues to be a family tradition. The agenda of this year´s event was the connection between generations, with a focus on the young. Not coincidentally, the program started with the performance of young guitarists from Hildesheim, for some of whom it was their first performance on stage.

Without doubt, one of the event´s highlights was the band Winterstein Sintett that performs in a mix of styles, such as swing, jazz, french “Chansons” and traditional songs in Romanes, the language of German Sinti.

Congratulations to RomMig’s Eve Rosenhaft!

Her article, Romani Berlin: ‘Gypsy’ Presence, the Culture of the Horse Market and the Shaping of Urban Space 1890–1933, was chosen as the winner of the European History Quarterly Article Prize 2022.

The piece formed part of a Special Issue of the BESTROM project entitled The Historical Presence of the Roma People in European Public Spaces in the 19th and 20th centuries

The judges made the following comments:

“Through the compelling lens of horse markets in early twentieth-century Berlin, this article provides a masterful analysis of the production of urban space. The research ranges across archival evidence and media representations to trace community interactions and networks. While critically noting the challenges of working on such materials, Rosenhaft commits to innovative handling in the use of mapping to visualize the data. A highly nuanced argument is constructed around varied images and lived experiences of interactions across and beyond the Roma communities, and it is finally situated in the idea of Berlin as ‘a space of fractured and layered remembering’. Having skilfully unpicked this rich historical material to cast light on urban spatial concepts, Rosenhaft poignantly draws attention to how such histories have been overshadowed by subsequent memorializations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”

 Well done, Eve!

One of the key themes of the RomMig project is the practices by which Sinti and Roma were policed in Germany and Britain and across Europe. European states and societies shared the project of monitoring, controlling and – in the long term – suppressing their mobility and their ways of living and working, a project which geared up in the decades studied by RomMig. 

Nearly all public agencies and social institutions took part in this project, and the police and the courts played key roles, maintaining a machinery of criminalisation and discrimination that operated without interruption even by the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 and persists today. This means that combating antigypsyism today calls for engagement with the police, judicial and other authorities to remind them of the history they share with Sinti and Roma and give them the tools to recognise and counter racism in their own everyday work. 

Our partner Mario Franz, of the Lower Saxony Association of German Sinti, is doing pioneering work in this field. He is consulting with police chiefs from across the region to establish anti-gypsyism awareness courses for new recruits to the police service, and in cooperation with the Leibniz University he is working to extend the training programme to staff in other agencies such as job centres and youth services.

Significantly, the most recent venue for the Association’s exhibition on the Nazi persecution of Sinti and Roma in Lower Saxony was the courthouse in Göttingen, where it was opened by the Göttingen Chief of Police and a senior judge of the district court.

RomMig held its first workshop at the University of Bielefeld on 6-7 March, under the title Transnational Migration in Romani History: Agency, Media, and Policing. In spite of the snowy weather, we were able to carry on our discussions in comfort with the friendly and expert support of Bielefeld’s state-of-the-art Centre for Interdisciplinary Research.

Speakers from the UK and Continental Europe discussed individual cases in Romani history and questions of sources, archives and interpretation from a range of disciplinary perspectives, with a particular focus on Romani experiences of migration and border-crossing. RomMig members Felix Brahm, Mario Franz, Eve Rosenhaft and Tamara West introduced the RomMig project, including aspects of research cooperation between scholars and the Romani community. 

Jodie Matthews (Huddersfield) opened the speaker sessions with the question ‘How do disciplinary borders impact figurations of the transnational?’ and with wide-ranging reflections on the potential uses of literary works and visual representations – sometimes read against the grain – as sources. Anglo-Romany scholar and poet Karen Barton offered examples of the ways in which Romani poets have negotiated questions of identity in the face of ‘legacies of bordered imaginations’, increasingly in dialogue with other diasporic and colonised people. Literary texts were also the theme of the presentation by Klaus-Michael Bogdal (Bielefeld) at the close of the workshop, in which he analysed the themes of migration, victimhood and resistance in Matéo Maximoff’s semi-autobiographical novel Verdammt zu Leben (French original: Condamné à survivre, 1984). 

Between these literary book-ends, presentations by historians addressed specific moments in Romani migration history, all on the basis of new in-depth research and all with an emphasis on the active agency and family strategies of Romani actors. With a paper on European ports as springboards for Romani mobility (1870-1920), Adèle Sutre (Paris) offered a glimpse into her rich research findings on the transoceanic migrations of Romani families in the ‘age of mass migration’. Simon Constantine (Wolverhampton) discussed the context of the movements of German Sinti and Roma which are at the centre of the RomMig project, detailing the intensified police harassment around 1900 that was a ‘push-factor’ for them; Romani resistance to the forced removal of Romani children from their families is a still under-researched dimension of the package of family strategies that included emigration. The impacts of state harassment and attempts at forced sedentarisation were also Colin Clark’s (Glasgow) theme, in his presentation on Scotland’s long-running ‘Tinker Experiment’ (1917-1989). Verena Meier (Heidelberg) gave an account of the situation of Central German Sinti families in the immediate post-war period, seeking to reunite scattered families under conditions of continuing public and official prejudice, the tightening of the German-German border and the forced expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe. Also focusing on the aftermath of the Holocaust, Volha Bartash (Regensburg) discussed her use of memoirs, diaries and visual material (in the absence of archival sources) to study the personal, familial and community dimensions of migration by Polska Roma. 

We are looking forward to preparing the workshop papers for open-access publication.

Meanwhile, the next RomMig conference will be held at the German Historical Institute, London, 24-26 April 2024. The title of the conference is Crossings: Non-Privileged Migration and Mobility Control in the Age of Global Empires (c. 1850-1914), and the Call for Papers is here.